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Previous research has argued that consecutive interpreters constitute laminated speakers in the sense that they engage with different kinds of footing at once, representing another's point of view through their words in another language. These multiple roles also play out in their gesturing, as they sometimes indicate deictically who is the source of the ideas and stances they are expressing (the principal). Simultaneous interpreters, though, often work in an interpreting booth; they are often not seen by the audience, yet many of them gesture, sometimes frequently. How are simultaneous interpreters using gesture in relation to stance-taking and footing? We consider the case of simultaneous interpreters rendering popular science lectures between (both to and from) Russian (their L1) and either English or German (their L2). Though only hearing the audio of the lectures, the interpreters produced many gestures, which were analyzed for their function. Some representational and deictic gestures appeared to clearly involve the interpreter as the principal (writing numbers with one's finger to help remember them or pointing to two places on the desk to keep track of two different quantities mentioned). Other representational and deictic gestures are ambiguous as to whether they are enacting what the interpreter may have imagined what the lecturer did or whether they arose out of the interpreter's own thinking for speaking (e.g., tracing the form of a bird being mentioned or pointing to an empty space when the lecturer was referring to a graph). Pragmatic gestures, showing one's stance toward the topic of the talk, were the most ambiguous as to the footing, reflecting how the interpreter may be engaged in fictive interaction with their imagined audience. Self-adapters, however, more clearly involve the interpreter as the principal, as such actions are known to support cognitive focussing and self-soothing. In sum, we see varying degrees of clarity as to whose stance and principal footing simultaneous interpreters are expressing bodily as laminated speakers. The variable ambiguity can be attributed to the nature of gesture as a semiotic system, the functions of which are more often dependent on co-occurring speech than vice versa.
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Previous research has shown language-specific features play a guiding role in how children develop expression of events with speech and gestures. This study adopts a multimodal approach and examines Mandarin Chinese, a language that features context use and verb serializations. Forty children (four-to-seven years old) and ten adults were asked to describe fourteen video stimuli depicting different types of causal events involving location/state changes. Participants' speech was segmented into clauses and co-occurring gestures were analyzed in relation to causation. The results show that the older the children, the greater the use of contextual clauses which contribute meaning to event descriptions. It is not until the age of six that children used adult-like structures - namely, using single gestures representing causing actions and aligning them with verb serializations in single clauses. We discuss the implications of these findings for the guiding role of language specificity in multimodal language development.
RESUMEN
Cognitive linguists are increasingly extending their paradigm to include the study of gestures. The bottom-up, usage-based approach in cognitive linguistics has advanced the methods for identifying gesture functions, starting from a detailed analysis of gesture forms. Theoretical notions from cognitive linguistics also help explain the means by which the forms of gestures can be interpreted as meaningful functions. Principles of conceptual metonymy explain how gestures indicate referents through the partial representation of their features that are relevant in the context of use. Conceptual metaphor theory sheds light on how abstract notions can be represented in gesture via comparison with physical source domains. Furthermore, every gestural representation inherently requires the gesturing speaker to employ a specific viewpoint for their depiction-something which is normally not expressed verbally. These aspects of gesture provide insights into processes of thinking for speaking that can be exploited in various fields of cognitive science research. Referential gestures also normally combine pragmatic and interactive functions (showing stance-taking, for example) with representational or deictic functions. The multiple functions of gesture combined with those of speech raise questions for further research about how viewing-listeners interpret and combine information from the multiple semiotic systems employed by gesturing-speakers. Finally, gesture use has been shown to correlate not only with lexical concepts but also in some ways with grammatical constructions. This gives rise to fundamental questions about what constitutes the grammar of a language. Gesture analysis thus raises issues for consideration in any research in cognitive science that concerns spoken language. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Cognitive Linguistics > Linguistic Theory Psychology > Language.